Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela
By Teddy Ostrow | FAIR | April 30, 2019
A FAIR survey of US opinion journalism on Venezuela found no voices in elite corporate media that opposed regime change in that country. Over a three-month period (1/15/19–4/15/19), zero opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post took an anti–regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position. Not a single commentator on the big three Sunday morning talkshows or PBS NewsHour came out against President Nicolás Maduro stepping down from the Venezuelan government.
Of the 76 total articles, opinion videos or TV commentator segments that centered on or gave more than passing attention to Venezuela, 54 (72 percent) expressed explicit support for the Maduro administration’s ouster. Eleven (14 percent) were ambiguous, but were only classified as such for lack of explicit language. Reading between the lines, most of these were clearly also pro–regime change. Another 11 (14 percent) took no position, but many similarly offered ideological ammo for those in support.
The Times published 22 pro–regime change commentaries, three ambiguous and five without a position. The Post also spared no space for the pro-Chavista camp: 22 of its articles expressed support for the end to Maduro’s administration, eight were ambiguous and four took no position. Of the 12 TV opinions surveyed, 10 were pro-regime change and two took no position.
(The Times and Post pieces were found through a Nexis search for “Venezuela” between 1/15/19–4/15/19 using each paper as a source, narrowed to opinion articles and editorials. The search was supplemented with an examination of each outlet’s opinion/blog pages. The TV commentary segments were found through Nexis searches for “Venezuela” and the name of the talkshow during the same time period, in the folders of the corresponding television network: NBC News/CBS News transcripts, ABC News transcripts, and PBS NewsHour. Non-opinion TV news segments were omitted. The full list of items included can be found here.)
Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change. If you’ve been reading FAIR recently (1/25/19, 2/9/19, 3/16/19)—or, indeed, since the early 2000s (4/18/02; Extra!, 11–12/05)—the anti-Maduro unanimity espoused in the most influential US media should come as no surprise.
This comes despite the existence of millions of Venezuelans who support Maduro—who was democratically elected twice by the same electoral system that won Juan Guaidó his seat in the National Assembly—and oppose US/foreign intervention. FAIR (2/20/19) has pointed out corporate media’s willful erasure of vast improvements to Venezuelan life under Chavismo, particularly for the oppressed poor, black, indigenous and mestizo populations. FAIR has also noted the lack of discussion of US-imposed sanctions, which have killed at least 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017–18 alone, and continue to devastate the Venezuelan economy.
Many authors in the sample eagerly championed the idea of the US ousting Maduro, including coup leader Juan Guiadó himself, in the Times (1/30/19) and Post (1/15/19), and on the NewsHour (2/18/19).
The Times made its official editorial opinion on the matter crystal clear at the outset of the attempted coup (1/24/19): “The Trump administration is right to support Mr. Guaidó.” Followed by FAIR’s favorite Times columnist, Bret Stephens (1/25/19):
The Trump administration took exactly the right step in recognizing National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s constitutionally legitimate president.
It’s generally a nation’s supreme court that has the final say on who is constitutionally legitimate, but in this case they can apparently be overruled by a foreign government—or a foreign newspaper columnist.
The Post editorial board also joined Team Unelected President (1/24/19):
The [Trump] administration’s best approach would be to join with its allies in initiatives that would help Venezuelans while bolstering Mr. Guaidó.
The Times even produced an opinion video (4/1/19) with Joanna Hausmann, “a Venezuelan American writer and comedian,” as she is described in her Times bio. Between sarcastic stabs at Venezuela’s “tyrannical dictator” and cute animations of “Ruth Bader Ginsburg in workout clothes”—Hausmann’s self-described “spirit animal”—come more serious declarations about the nation’s political situation:
Juan Guiadó is not an American right-wing puppet leading an illegitimate coup, but a social democrat appointed by the National Assembly, the only remaining democratically elected institution left in Venezuela…. Let’s provide humanitarian aid and support efforts to restore democracy.
Odd that the Times didn’t find it necessary to note a blaring conflict of interest: Hausmann’s father is Ricardo Hausmann, Juan Guaidó’s appointed Inter-American Development Bank representative. Mint Press News (3/19/19) bluntly described him as the “neoliberal brain behind Juan Guaidó’s neoliberal agenda.”
It would be ludicrous to think the Times would withhold as blatant a connection to Maduro if one of his aides’ daughters made a snarky opinion video calling Juan Guaidó a would-be “brutal dictator”—even if our theoretical commentator was “an independent adult woman who has built a popular following on her own,” as Times opinion video producer Adam Ellick said in defense of the omission. Such a crucial relationship to a powerful Chavista politician would never go undisclosed—in the unlikely event that such a perspective would be tolerated in the opinion pages of an establishment paper.
These are just a few of many media pundits’ endorsements of Guaidó—someone whose name most of the Venezuelan population did not even recognize before he declared himself interim president. Put more accurately, they are endorsements of a US-backed coup attempt.
One of the more muddled regime change endorsements came from Rep. Ro Khanna’s Post op-ed (1/30/19), in which he says no! to military intervention, no! to sanctions, yet yes! to… “diplomatic efforts”:
The United States should lend its support to diplomatic efforts to find some form of power-sharing agreement between opposition parties, and only until fair elections can take place, so that there is an orderly transition of power.
“Diplomatic” is a reassuring term, until you realize that US diplomacy, as FAIR’s Janine Jackson explained on Citations Needed podcast (3/20/19), is “diplomacy where we try to get other countries to do what we want them to do”—in this case, effecting a “transition of power” in another country’s government.
Francisco Rodríguez and Jeffrey D. Sachs (New York Times, 2/2/19) envision similar efforts for a “peaceful and negotiated transition of power,” and Khanna made sure to characterize Maduro as “an authoritarian leader who has presided over unfair elections, failed economic policies, extrajudicial killings by police, food shortages and cronyism with military leaders.”
In other words, Maduro the Dictator must be overthrown—but don’t worry, the US would be diplomatic about it.
Those that didn’t take explicit positions nonetheless wrote articles blaming all or most of Venezuela’s woes on Maduro and Chávez. Economics wiz Paul Krugman (New York Times, 1/29/19) gave his spiel:
Hugo Chávez got into power because of rage against the nation’s elite, but used the power badly. He seized the oil sector, which you only do if you can run it honestly and efficiently; instead, he turned it over to corrupt cronies, who degraded its performance. Then, when oil prices fell, his successor tried to cover the income gap by printing money. Hence the crisis.
Note that Krugman failed to mention the 57 percent reduction in extreme poverty that followed Chávez’s replacement of management of the state-owned oil industry (which has been nationalized since 1976, long before Chavismo). Nor does he acknowledge the impact of US sanctions, or any other sort of US culpability for Venezuela’s economic crisis.
Caroline Kennedy and Sarah K. Smith (Washington Post, 2/5/19) did not explicitly blame Maduro and Chávez for Venezuela’s “spiral downward,” but similarly ignored evidenced US involvement in that spiral. There are only so many places where you can point fingers without naming names.
Dictatorship-talk—writers lamenting the horrific and helpless situation under an alleged “dictator”—characterized many of the ambiguous and no-position articles. In the Post (1/24/19), Megan McArdle asked:
You have to look at Venezuela today and wonder: Is this what we’re seeing, the abrupt end of Venezuela’s years-long economic nightmare? Has President Nicolás Maduro’s ever-more-autocratic and incompetent regime finally completed its long pilgrimage toward disaster?
By simply describing the declining situation of a country (Times, 2/12/19, 4/1/19) and using words like “regime” (Times, 2/14/19), “authoritarian” (Post, 1/29/19) and, of course, “dictatorship” (Post, 1/23/19; Times, 2/27/19) in reference to government officials, commentators create the pretext for regime change without explicitly endorsing it.
The Sunday talkshows and NewsHour also couldn’t find a single person to challenge the anti-Maduro narrative. They did find room, however, for three of the most passionate advocates of regime change in Venezuela: Sen. Marco Rubio (Meet the Press, 1/27/19), Donald Trump (Face the Nation, 2/3/19) and Guaidó himself (NewsHour, 2/18/19).
Other TV regime change proponents included Florida Sen. Rick Scott (Meet the Press, 2/3/19), 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls Peter Buttigieg (This Week, 2/3/19) and Amy Klobuchar (Meet the Press, 3/17/19), Sen. Tim Kaine (Face the Nation, 3/17/19), and Guaidó-appointed, Mike Pence-approved “chargé d’affaires” Carlos Vecchio (NewsHour, 3/4/19).
But leave it to Nick Schifrin of the NewsHour (1/30/19) to bring on “two views” of the US intervention question that are both pro-regime change and pro-US intervention. View No. 1 came from Isaias Medina, a former Venezuelan diplomat who resigned from his post in protest against Maduro. Medina made the unlikely claim that 94 percent of the Venezuelan population—or 129 percent of the population over the age of 14—support US intervention to overthrow the Maduro government:
Not only I, but 30 million people, support not only the US circumstance, but also the Latin American initiative to restore the rule of law, democracy and freedom in Venezuela.
View No. 2, the ostensibly anti-regime change take, came from Benjamin Gedan, who served on the Obama administration’s National Security Council as director for Venezuela and the Southern Cone. When asked if he supported Trump’s moves to sanction Maduro and possibly use US troops to oust him, Gedan responded:
I think both of those steps are problematic. I think the sense of urgency that the United States administration has shown is absolutely correct…. The question is, how can we assist the Venezuelan people [to] promote a peaceful transition in Venezuela, without harming the people themselves, or fracturing the coalition that we have built over two administrations?
In other words, how can we overthrow the Venezuelan government without destroying the country—or “fracturing the coalition we have built”? The US has many options on the table, but none of them involve not pursuing the overthrow of Maduro.
In the “no position” camp for TV news, New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger (Face the Nation, 1/27/19) noted that the problem with US support for Guaidó is one of “both history and inconsistency”:
Our history in Latin America of intervening is a pretty ugly one, and the inconsistency of not applying the same standards to places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where the president has embraced strong men, I think may come back to make the United States look pretty hypocritical, not for the first time.
Sanger indulged in the popular “hypocrisy takedown”: The problem, as presented, isn’t that the US disrupts democracies, destroys economies and kills people, but rather that it does so inconsistently. While vaguely acknowledging the US’s horrific track record of Latin American interventions, and Trump’s cherry-picking of governments worthy of regime change, Sanger didn’t take the logical next step of calling for the US to keep its hands off Venezuela. Instead, he called Maduro’s supporters—defined as “China, Russia and Cuba”—“not a great collection,” and failed to push back against the claim that Maduro “fixed the last” election. Without a formal declaration, Sanger did all the ideological preparation for foreign-backed regime change.
That elite media didn’t find a single person to vouch for Maduro or Chavismo, and that almost all the opinions explicitly or implicitly expressed support for the ouster of Venezuela’s elected president, demonstrates a firm editorial line, eerily obedient to the US government’s regime change policy.
This isn’t the first time that FAIR (e.g., 3/18/03, 4/18/18) has found a one-sided debate in corporate media on US intervention. When it comes to advocating the overthrow of the US government’s foreign undesirables, you can always count on opinion pages to represent all sides of why it’s a good thing. And the millions of people who beg to differ? Well, they’re just out of the question.
The New York Times Apologizes for “Anti-Semitic” Cartoon While Enabling Real Bigotry in Israel
By Helen Buyniski | Aletho News | May 1, 2019
The New York Times has begged forgiveness for printing a cartoon that supposedly “included anti-Semitic tropes” in its international edition, but no amount of shameless groveling will stop the Israeli weaponization of the “anti-Semitism” smear as it steamrolls America’s once-sacred First Amendment freedoms. This is a crusade to silence all legitimate criticism of a criminal regime, and if the Times has anything to apologize for, it is its complicity in that quest.
The offending cartoon depicts President Donald Trump as a blind man being led by a guide dog with the face of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, identified by a star-of-David collar. It’s unclear what the “anti-Semitic trope” in this case is supposed to be – the collar is arguably necessary to confirm the dog is Netanyahu, and the reader would have to be a political illiterate to interpret that as a stand-in for “all Jews.” The Times’ willingness to slap the “anti-Semitic trope” label on the cartoon anyway should put to rest the ridiculous “anti-Semitic trope” trope that is tirelessly deployed to smother accusations of wrongdoing by Israel or its lobbying organizations inside the US.
Netanyahu himself has boasted that Trump acted on his orders when he declared Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization earlier this month, and Trump’s willingness to flout international law to unilaterally “give” the Golan Heights to Netanyahu as a re-election present shocked the world, unsettling even some Zionists who believe the land is rightfully theirs but worry the US’ official declaration will galvanize regional opposition to the occupation. Netanyahu’s last election campaign was arguably based on his ability to “lead” the US president blindly off the edge of a geopolitical cliff. Is he guilty of perpetuating anti-Semitic tropes for bragging about it?
Most papers only apologize when they’ve printed something erroneous. The Times has chosen instead to issue a correction for one of the few accurate depictions of the relationship between Israel and the White House, a glimmer of truth even more notable for its contrast with the paper’s usual disinformation painting Trump as some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semite.
The Times’ decision to apologize for this cartoon while remaining silent when a cartoon depicting Trump in a gay love affair with Vladimir Putin was condemned by LGBT readers last year betrays the editorial board’s high moral dudgeon as the most transparent hypocrisy. US media has long smeared Putin’s government as homophobic, yet here they were presenting him half-clothed in a stomach-turning romantic embrace with Trump – a president who, it should be noted, has presided over the deterioration of US-Russia relations to levels not seen since the Cold War. But LGBT Twitter ultimately has little power in society, unlike the Israeli lobby, and the unfavorable depiction of Trump ensured most influential LGBT organizations steered clear of criticizing the cartoon. Outrage has become yet another commodity to be traded, not a genuine response to offense.
If it’s in a repentant mood, however, the Times could apologize for its one-sided coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – much of it fed to them by The Israel Project, which skews US coverage of the facts on the ground in Israel by supplying American reporters with talking points in order to “neutralize undesired narratives.” From these spinmeisters we get the passive voice used to frame IDF soldiers mowing down unarmed protesters as “clashes occurred” and “Palestinian protesters were killed,” as well as breathless coverage of tunnels, kites, and rocket attacks that rarely seem to hit anyone.
The Times could apologize for its failure to expose the global campaign to redefine “anti-Zionism” as “anti-Semitism,” instead of playing into it by pretending a truthful cartoon is somehow an affront to Jews – as if all Jews support the racist policies of the Israeli government. Indeed, to assume all Jews back the criminal Netanyahu regime in its openly genocidal campaign to eradicate the Palestinians from the few enclaves of the West Bank in which they remain while maintaining an open-air concentration camp in Gaza is wildly anti-Semitic.
The Times could apologize for failing to report on the massive Israeli spying operation – funded, in no small part, by the US taxpayer – targeting American activists on American soil, exposed in detail in the suppressed al-Jazeera documentary “The Lobby,” which leaked last year to deafening silence in the media. Journalist Max Blumenthal actually spoke with a Times journalist who wanted to cover the explosive revelations of the documentary, but no story ever appeared. As Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada, has pointed out, the suppression of the documentary should have been a story in and of itself – and would have, had it involved any other country.
“Imagine that this had been an undercover documentary revealing supposed Russian interference, or Iranian interference… in US policy, and powerful groups had gone to work to suppress its broadcast and it had leaked out. Just that element of it – the suppression and the leak – should be front page news in the Washington Post and the New York Times,” he told Chris Hedges, whose RT program was the closest thing to mainstream coverage the documentary received in the US.
The Times instead chooses to cover up the actions of groups like the Israel on Campus Coalition as they surveil and smear pro-Palestinian activists – college students, professors, and others sympathetic to Israel’s sworn enemy – using a strategy the ICC’s executive director Jacob Baime admits is based on US General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. “The Lobby” revealed that agents working for the Israeli government infiltrate pro-Palestinian, pro-peace groups using fake social media accounts and report their findings back to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a shocking fact that none of the organizations named in the film have disputed. A foreign government operating a military-style surveillance network to target and smear American citizens in their own country – for nothing more than exercising their freedom of speech – gets a pass from the Times, but a cartoon showing Trump’s blind loyalty to Israel for what it is must be condemned.
It’s tough to electrify an outraged mob based on a story that wasn’t printed, but the Times’ failure to address the very real threat to Americans exercising their free speech – a threat all the more dire because it is funded by US tax dollars to the tune of $3.8 billion per year – merits at least a full-page apology. Compounding the insult is a domestic economic crisis, with many American cities facing record homelessness, skyrocketing cost of living, a dearth of secure employment and an excess of exploitative “gig economy” temp work, and a rapidly-disappearing social safety net. Israel is a wealthy country, as Netanyahu often boasts, a successful country. Only a truly blind government could continue to fork over such enormous sums of money while Americans languish in poverty.
“The anti-Semitism smear is not what it used to be,” one lobbyist laments to al-Jazeera’s hidden camera-equipped reporter. Perhaps this is why the state of Florida has advanced a bill to criminalize “anti-Semitism,” now broadly redefined to include “alleging myths… that Jews control the media, economy, government, or other institutions.” The bill passed the House unanimously, the one holdout bullied into submission when she voiced concerns about its incompatibility with the First Amendment, yet to point out – as AIPAC does – that this bipartisan approval exists because the Israeli lobby has influence over both parties, or that this influence can make or break a candidate, is about to become illegal. When even a milquetoast like Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke has stuck his neck out to call Netanyahu a racist – and he receives more money from the Israeli lobby than most of his House colleagues – the Times should be ashamed of itself for pushing the fiction that criticism of Israel and its iron grip on the US government is equivalent to anti-Semitism.
The Times’ own article about its apology quotes an interview with the “guilty” party, Portuguese cartoonist Antonio Moreira Antunes, from the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack, when four cartoonists and the magazine’s editor were murdered, supposedly for printing an offensive cartoon. There is a definite parallel with the Zionist outrage mobs calling for Antunes’ head – figuratively, if not yet literally; many are unsatisfied with the Times’ apology and insist Antunes suffer for his insolence by losing his job, if not his life. Antunes, in the interview, called his job “a profession of risk,” but states “there is no other option but to defend freedom of expression.”
The New York Times, and everyone else who demanded they apologize for a truthful cartoon while ignoring their failure to oppose genuine bigotry in the Netanyahu regime and supporters of Zionism, clearly do not agree that freedom of expression is worth defending. A press that cannot even defend itself does not deserve to be called “free.’
Terrifying predictions about the melting North Pole!
By Larry Kummer | Watts Up With That? | April 30, 2019
Summary: We have had 30 years of bold but false predictions by climate scientists, met by silence from their peers. These make skeptics, and are one reason why the public does not support radical public policy actions. Here are 20 years of predictions about the melting North Pole.
A stream of predictions about an ice-free arctic ocean
Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge, is famous for his predictions – and his amazing record of being wrong. Journalists report each prediction as if made by Einstein, not telling readers about Wadhams’ dismal record. That is how they report climate science and keep their readers misinformed.
“Within a decade we can expect regular summer trade there {across the arctic ocean}.” — “Arctic Meltdown,” a NASA press release on 27 February 2001.
Eighteen years later, no regular cargo crossing the arctic ocean. There are small numbers of specially built ships making the passage on the northern coasts (e.g., here, here, and here).
“By 2013, we will see a much smaller area in summertime than now; and certainly by about 2020, I can imagine that only one area will remain in summer.” — BBC, 13 May 2009.
Twice wrong. The 2013 average and minimum ice extent was roughly unchanged from that in 2009. In 2018, the minimum was 4.6 million square kilometers, only 12% down from 2009. I doubt 2020 will be much different.
“The entire ice cover is now on the point of collapse. …The extra open water already created by the retreating ice allows bigger waves to be generated by storms, which are sweeping away the surviving ice. It is truly the case that it will be all gone by 2015. The consequences are enormous and represent a huge boost to global warming.” — The Scotsman, 29 August 2012.
Not only was it not “all gone by 2015” but that quote appeared three weeks from the record low point on September 17.
“I have been predicting [the collapse of sea ice in summer months] for many years. The main cause is simply global warming …This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free. The final collapse towards that state is now happening and will probably be complete by those dates.” — The Guardian, 17 September 2012.
Ditto. There was a great deal of excitement among alarmists about the 2012 low, and the usual linear extrapolation to a disaster coming really soon. Wadhams presented at the September 2014 Royal Society conference “Arctic sea ice reduction: the evidence, models, and global impacts.” A few climate scientists made mildly critical tweets about his presentation. Gavin Schmidt (Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) was the most critical. He is, to the best of my knowledge, exceptional in his willingness to speak out about alarmist claims by his peers. See the tweets. But there is no evidence they called friendly journalists to protest journalists’ uncritical publication of Wadham’s predictions. But skeptical climate scientists often receive barrages of criticism from their peers, sometimes for repeating material in the IPCC’s reports and peer-review literature (e.g., Roger Pielke Jr. by scientists such as Gavin Schmidt – details here).
“Most people expect this year will see a record low in the Arctic’s summer sea-ice cover. Next year or the year after that, I think it will be free of ice in summer and by that I mean the central Arctic will be ice-free. You will be able to cross over the north pole by ship. …Ice-free means the central basin of the Arctic will be ice-free and I think that that is going to happen in summer 2017 or 2018. — The Guardian, 21 August 2016.
Twice wrong, again. The 2016 minimum was 23% above the 2012 minimum. The arctic was not ice-free in 2017 or 2018. Not even icebreakers cross over the North Pole.
“{T}he planet is swiftly heading toward a largely ice-free Arctic in the warmer months, possibly as early as 2020.” — Yale Environment 360, 26 September 2016.
The record minimum extent was in 2012. The previous minimum was 4.16 million km in 2007. The 2018 minimum was 4.95 million km. That is a 19% increase over 12 years. Wadhams had lots of headline-loving company among climate scientists. For example, Wieslaw Maslowsk – a research professor at the Navy Postgraduate School.
“Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years. …Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss. …’Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,’ the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. ‘So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.’” — BBC, 12 December 2007.
The “projection” of an ice-free summer in 2013 was not “too conservative.” It was too aggressive. 
That is an example of successful clickbait by Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic on 29 December 2015. This is the alarmists’ usual trick of describing weather as “extraordinary” based on our brief instrument record, when it probably is not.
“It’s really hard to predict when we could see ice-free summers in the Arctic, but it could be as soon as in 20 to 40 years, Francis says.” — Jennifer Francis was then a professor at Rutgers, now a senior scientist at Woods Hole. Quoted in The Verge, 10 May 2018.
Now that is a safe prediction. If accurate, it will become famous in 2040 or 2060. If wrong, it will go down the memory hole with all the other wrong predictions about climate.
The real story
See the three lines in color showing the sea ice extents of 2007 (blue, middle), 2012 (dotted, bottom), and 2018 (thin grey, top), and the thick grey line of the 1981 – 2010 mean. Sea ice extent has been flattish for twelve years. For another perspective, the PIOMAS model shows that Arctic sea ice volume has been flattish for nine years. Click graph to enlarge.
From the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Why is Maria Butina in Prison?
By Ron Paul | April 29, 2019
Russian gun rights activist and graduate exchange student Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week for “conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without registering.” Her “crime” was to work to make connections among American gun rights activists in hopes of building up her organization, the Right to Bear Arms, when she returned to Russia.
She was not employed by the Russian government nor was she a lobbyist on Putin’s behalf. In fact the Putin Administration is hostile to Russian gun rights groups. Nevertheless the US mainstream media and Trump’s Justice Department are treating her as public enemy number one in a case that will no doubt set the dangerous precedent of criminalizing person-to-person diplomacy in the United States.
The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was passed in 1938 under pressure from the FDR Administration partly to silence opposition to the US entry into World War II. While a handful of cases were prosecuted during the war, between 1966 and 2015 the Justice Department only brought seven FARA cases for prosecution.
Though very few cases have been brought on FARA violations, one of them was against Samir Vincent, who was paid millions of dollars by Saddam Hussein to lobby for sanctions relief without registering. He got off with a fine and “community service.”
Millions of dollars in unregistered payments from Saddam Hussein gets no jail time, while Butina gets 18 months in prison for privately promoting a cause most Americans support! How is this justice? The US Justice Department is not even as tough on illegals who commit capital crimes in the US!
Unfortunately Maria Butina was in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the rise of the “Russiagate” hysteria, Butina’s case was seen as a useful tool by Democrats to push the idea that President Trump was put into office by the Russians. Plus, many of them are also hostile to our Second Amendment and to the National Rifle Association. So it was a perfect storm for Butina.
Sadly, conservatives are mostly silent on this miscarriage of justice. They are also caught up in the idea that America can only be great if it goes abroad seeking monsters to destroy.
Also, a new Cold War is very profitable to the military industrial complex and Butina serves an important propaganda purpose. The media is an all-to-willing participant in this farce.
Even though Trump has been exonerated by a Mueller investigation that didn’t even view the Butina case as worth investigating, the President has been silent on her persecution. This is similar to his sudden silence on Wikileaks now that Julian Assange may be facing an eternity in a US supermax prison.
As author James Bamford wrote recently in an excellent New Republic article on the Butina case, the national security agencies are also eager to get another notch in their belts and the Russian gun activist was low-hanging fruit for their ambitions.
Non-interventionists believe strongly in citizen-to-citizen diplomacy as a way of avoiding war and conflict overseas. Exchange students, international business ventures, tourism, and just communicating with others is such an important way to thwart the plotting of the warmongers who lurk in all governments.
I am saddened to see that the United States has made such a hostile move toward peaceful foreign citizens seeking friendship with Americans. When citizens are no longer allowed to engage in diplomacy we are left with only the state. And the state loves war.
For NYT, Israel Is Always Nearing ‘Apartheid,’ but Never Quite Gets There
By Gregory Shupak | FAIR | April 26, 2019
Following Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election as Israeli prime minister earlier this month, the New York Times’ editorial board (4/11/19) wrote:
Under Mr. Netanyahu, Israel is on a trajectory to become what critics say will be an apartheid state like the former South Africa—a country in which Palestinians will eventually be a majority, but without the rights of citizens.
A harsh criticism? Actually, the paper has been saying that Israel/Palestine could “become” an apartheid state for the better part of two decades. It ran a piece in 2003 (1/29/03) arguing that
if Israel does not give up the territories, it will face a choice: relinquish either democracy or the ideal of a Jewish state. Granting Palestinians in the territories the right to vote would turn Israel into an Arab state with a Jewish minority. Not allowing them to vote would result in a form of permanent apartheid.
For almost 20 years, the paper has suggested that Israel/Palestine risks devolving into an apartheid state if it continues to rule over Palestinians in the territories—Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem—who cannot choose their rulers. This population includes approximately 4.75 million occupied Palestinians—320,000 in East Jerusalem, 2.8 million in the rest of the West Bank and 1.8 million in besieged Gaza—to say nothing of the millions of Palestinian refugees who cannot return to their homes and participate in elections because the people who put on those elections won’t let them.
That situation has remained the same, not only for the period that the Times has been publishing material saying the arrangement might someday add up to apartheid, but since 1967. Yet the Times persists in characterizing Israeli apartheid as a hypothetical future development. The paper acknowledges that governing millions of Palestinians but denying them the vote is a form of apartheid, so there’s no justification for saying, after nearly 52 years of such disenfranchisement, that that will eventually constitute apartheid, but for some unspecified reason doesn’t yet at this point.
Tom Friedman’s Groundhog Day
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman appears to be having a Groundhog Day experience: He keeps waking up, looking at Israel’s ethnocracy, and saying that if it continues to be apartheid, it will become apartheid. In 2002 (10/16/02), he commented:
If you think it is hard to defend Israel on campus today, imagine doing it in 2010, when the colonial settlers have so locked Israel into the territories it can rule them only by apartheid-like policies.
2010 came and went, and the “apartheid-like” conditions remained, but Friedman persisted in treating Israeli apartheid as a mere possibility, writing (2/1/11) of the 2011 protests in Egypt:
If Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
A year later (8/1/12), Friedman said:
It is in Israel’s overwhelming interest to test, test and have the US keep testing creative ideas for a two-state solution. That is what a real US friend would promise to do. Otherwise, Israel could be doomed to become a kind of apartheid South Africa.
Two years after that (2/11/14), Friedman said that “Israel by default could become some kind of apartheid-like state in permanent control over… 2.5 million Palestinians.” Even in this so-called criticism of Israel, Friedman does the state a favor by acting as though the West Bank Palestinians are the only ones disenfranchised by Israel, overlooking the refugees and Gaza, even as Israel continues to control the latter. (He also appears to leave out Palestinian Jerusalemites.)
Evidence for Already-Existing Apartheid
As Friedman and his paper kept predicting that Israel/Palestine could turn into an apartheid entity, evidence mounted that it is exactly that. For example, United Nations special rapporteur John Dugard found in 2007 that “elements of the [Israeli] occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law.” He went on to say that at the checkpoints throughout the West Bank and surrounding Jerusalem,
a [Palestinian] person may be refused passage through a checkpoint for arguing with a soldier or explaining his documents…. Checkpoints and the poor quality of secondary roads Palestinians are obliged to use, in order to leave the main roads free for settler use, result in journeys that previously took 10 to 20 minutes taking 2 to 3 hours…. In apartheid South Africa, a similar system [was] designed to restrict the free movement of blacks —the notorious “pass laws.”
Another UN special rapporteur, Richard Falk, noted in 2010 that “among the salient apartheid features of the Israeli occupation” are “discriminatory arrangements for movement in the West Bank and to and from Jerusalem,” as well as
extensive burdening of Palestinian movement, including checkpoints applying differential limitations on Palestinians and on Israeli settlers, and onerous permit and identification requirements imposed only on Palestinians.
A March 2017 report by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia concluded that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
That July, however, Friedman (7/12/17) continued to treat Israeli apartheid as something that might happen down the road, wishing that President Trump had admonished Netanyahu in a meeting between the two:
Bibi, you win every debate, but meanwhile every day the separation of Israel from the Palestinians grows less likely, putting Israel on a “slippery slope toward apartheid,” as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently warned.
Last September (9/19/18), Friedman was still worried about this supposedly theoretical scenario:
Without some dramatic advance, there is a real chance that whatever Palestinian governance exists will crumble, and Israel will have to take full responsibility for the health, education and welfare of the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel would then have to decide whether to govern the West Bank with one legal authority or two, which would mean Israel would be choosing between bi-nationalism and apartheid, both disasters for a Jewish democracy.
Netanyahu, Friedman went on to say, has failed to offer “any new, or old, ideas on how to separate from the Palestinians to avoid the terrible choices of bi-nationalism and apartheid.”
Erasing Palestinians
Setting aside the troubling assertion that Israelis and Palestinians living as equals would be not only a “disaster,” but as bad a “disaster” as apartheid, Friedman ignored the fact that just two months earlier, the Knesset had passed the Nation State Law that defined Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. The law asserted that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” even though 20 percent of the population living inside Israel is not Jewish; encouraged “the development of Jewish settlement” and vowed that the state will “promote its establishment and consolidation.” It declared that “the state’s language is Hebrew,” deprecating Arabic, the first language of roughly half the people under that state’s control.
The Nation State Law demonstrates that the bad faith, future tense descriptions of Israeli apartheid are overly narrow, in that they focus exclusively on the Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied since 1967. Yet on the Israeli-held side of the Green Line, Palestinians are systematically discriminated against.
It’s not only the occupation that make Israel/Palestine apartheid. It’s the Israeli state’s foundational principles and actions: driving two-thirds of the indigenous Palestinian population from their homes at its birth, subsequently making more than 2 million of them refugees, and then denying their right to return, despite its being mandated under international law.
Meanwhile, Jewish people anywhere on Earth are given the right to immigrate, because Israeli leaders want to maintain a demographic advantage. They pursue this goal—with decisive help from their sponsors in Washington—through their longstanding operational policy mantra: maximum land, minimum Arabs.
Not even three full days after the New York Times’ most recent brooding about how Israel might “become” an apartheid state, Israel’s Supreme Court approved the demolition of 500 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. Is it apartheid yet?
Accused ‘spy’ Maria Butina wouldn’t be in jail if she ‘wasn’t Russian’ – attorney
RT | April 26, 2019
After gun activist Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in jail for failing to register as a foreign agent, her lawyer stated that things would be completely different if she wasn’t guilty of the crime of being Russian.
“Anyone who thinks that someone who wasn’t Russian would be in this situation is fooling themselves,” attorney Robert Driscoll told reporters on Friday. Butina had just been sentenced to 18 months in prison, with nine served already, and will be deported to Russia after serving her time.
From the moment of her arrest, right up to her sentencing, Butina’s treatment at the hands of the US justice system and in the court of public opinion has been tainted by the cloud of Russian hysteria hanging over Washington DC.
A gun rights activist who wanted to make Russia’s restrictive gun laws more like the US’, Butina landed in the US in 2016 on a student visa. As the founder of a pro-gun group in Russia, Butina hobnobbed with National Rifle Association and Republican figures in America.
However, Butina was arrested last year for failing to register as a foreign agent, a requirement that the 30-year-old didn’t even know she had to meet. Curiously, as she was unaware of the requirement, Butina was charged with a more serious offense that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who knew the law but didn’t follow it.
Given the timing of Butina’s arrest, the media and prosecution went into overdrive. Here, at long last, was a Russian agent caught meddling in American affairs. Assistant US Attorney Erik M. Kenerson claimed she was offering an individual “sex in exchange for a position within a special interest organization.”
Kenerson later backtracked his statement, which he said was based on a “mistaken” understanding of text messages between Butina and a romantic partner.
The media took the bait though. “Sex and schmoozing are common Russian spy tactics. Publicity makes Maria Butina different,” read a USA Today headline. Butina, Time Magazine wrote at the same time, “lived a double life by using sex and a love of guns to infiltrate American political organizations…in order to advance Moscow’s agenda.” Journalists didn’t question Butina’s operation in the open, with USA Today concluding her transparency about her agenda is “evidence the Russians have grown bolder in their spy efforts.”
Would the same low-grade Cold War spy erotica have graced the pages of national news outlets if Butina were, say, a French gun activist?
With the outrage machine at full steam, Butina spent much of the past nine months stewing in a Virginia jail. There, she was allegedly subjected to conditions described by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as “normally reserved for dangerous repeat offenders.”
The Russian embassy in Washington DC, which sent staff to meet with Butina frequently, described the conditions of her detention as “borderline torture,” and detailed a litany of abuses against the Russian activist. Butina was strip searched, denied medication and hygiene items, kept in solitary confinement, and regularly had her sleep disrupted, the embassy claimed.
Lavrov stated that such treatment was designed to poke Butina into accepting a plea deal with prosecutors, which she eventually did in December.
But why were American authorities so desperate to prove sinister Russian activity?
“There’s no allegation of espionage, there’s no allegation of classified information, there’s no allegation she was paying anyone off, there’s no allegation she was recruiting spies. None of the things you would typically see in an espionage case,” Driscoll told RT last year.
“I think this was a political gambit to deal with bigger geopolitical issues to try to ruin the outcome of the summit between Trump and Putin,” human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik told RT at the time, noting that Butina was arrested one day before Presidents Trump and Putin met in Helsinki. As long as the case against Butina dragged on, the US government had human proof that the specter of ‘Russian meddling’ in US politics was alive and well.
In court on Friday, prosecutors did their best to keep the narrative alive. Prosecutor Erik Kenerson told the judge that Butina was concocting a plan to establish communications between the Trump White House and Russia, an issue he said was ‘of extreme importance to the Russian Federation.”
“Her conduct shows how easy it can be for a foreign government to target Americans in the US,” he added.
Butina’s treatment, meanwhile, shows how easy it can be for an innocent student to be targeted by a justice system bent on finding Russians meddling in everything.
BBC Accused Of Serious Errors And Misleading Statements In David Attenborough’s Climate Show
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 26, 2019
The GWPF has now formally submitted its complaint to the BBC about David Attenborough’s Climate Change – The Facts:
The BBC programme, presented by Sir David Attenborough, went far beyond its remit to present the facts of climate change, instead broadcasting a highly politicised manifesto in favour of renewable energy and unjustified alarm.
The programme highlighted suggestions that storms, floods, heatwaves and sea level rise are all rapidly getting worse as a result of climate change.
However, the best available data, published in the last few years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA, contradicts the BBC’s alarmist exaggeration of empirical evidence.
In its 5th Assessment Report (2013), the IPCC concluded:
“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”
In its more recent Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, published in 2018, these findings were reconfirmed. It stated that
“Numerous studies towards and beyond AR5 have reported a decreasing trend in the global number of tropical cyclones and/or the globally accumulated cyclonic energy… There is consequently low confidence in the larger number of studies reporting increasing trends in the global number of very intense cyclones.”
Regarding floods, the IPCC’s Special Report concluded:
“There is low confidence due to limited evidence, however, that anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and the magnitude of floods. “
There is also no observational evidence that the rate of sea level rise is getting worse. NASA satellite data shows that since 1993, there has been an annual mean sea level rise of 3.3mm, with no significant level of acceleration in the last three decades.
Suggestions by David Attenborough and Michael Mann that climate change is causing increases in wildfires in the US and globally are also misleading and not supported by any empirical evidence.
According to a survey published by the Royal Society the global area burned has actually declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence to suggest that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago. These are vitally important facts that should have been mentioned if an accurate description of the impact of climate change on wildfires was to be maintained.
In his letter of complaint, Dr Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, has asked the BBC to acknowledge and correct the evident errors and misleading suggestions documented in the complaint and offer remedial measures as soon as possible.
The full complaint is available here (pdf)
Coming Clean on Washing Machine Tariffs
By Dean Baker | CEPR | April 23, 2019
Jim Tankersley had a piece in the NYT yesterday on the cost per job saved of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese washing machines. According to the study, the cost per job saved was $817,000. While that is a steep tab, there are a few points that should be added to this sort of analysis.
First, if the point of the tariffs is to benefit workers, part of this $817,000 cost is going to higher pay to workers who would have jobs with or without the tariff. The study doesn’t look at the impact on wages of workers in the industry, but if the goal is to help workers who make washing machines, then this should be factored into the assessment.
The second point is that this is a partial equilibrium analysis. It doesn’t look at the overall effect on the economy of a reduction in the money we spend on importing washing machines. While this can be hard to assess, since imports of washing machines from China are a very small part of the total economy, other things equal we would expect that less money spent on imported washing machines would translate into a higher-valued dollar. (We are reducing the supply of dollars on world markets, thereby raising the price of dollars.)
This effect is almost certainly very small, but suppose that the reduced payments for imported washing machines raised the value of the dollar by just 0.01 percent. If this rise in the dollar were fully passed on in lower import prices (it isn’t), that would translate in a reduction in the cost of imports to US consumers of $320 million, more than 20 percent of the cost of the tariffs estimated in this study. Even if it would be hard to get any sort of precise numbers, the point is that this is an offsetting effect which could be large relative to the estimated cost of the tariffs.
The third point is that tariffs can sometimes make sense if they allow an industry breathing space to reorganize and regain competitiveness or serve some other goal (e.g. persuading a country to raise the value of its currency). In 1983, Ronald Reagan imposed tariffs on Japanese motorcycles in order to help out Harley Davidson. In 2006, when President George W. Bush wanted to tout the virtues of free trade, he visited a Harley Davidson factory in Pennsylvania which was a major producer of motorcycles for exports. It is unlikely that Harley Davidson would have been exporting motorcycles in 2006 without the tariffs that allowed it some breathing space in 1983.
Of course, none of this means that Trump’s washing machine tariffs are a good idea. If they are in fact part of a well-crafted trade and industrial policy strategy, he is managing to keep this strategy secret from just about everyone. It looks mostly like the main effect will just be that we pay more for washing machines, even if the story may not be quite as bad as advertised.
Wikipedia founder appointed to judge trustworthiness of news, proving satire is dead
By Helen Buyniski | RT | April 26, 2019
The Orwellian browser plugin NewsGuard, which purports to judge the trustworthiness of media outlets, has appointed Wikipedia’s founder to its board, proving that even neoliberal thought police have a sense of humor.
In its bid to “tackle misinformation online,” NewsGuard has named such defenders of journalistic integrity as former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to its advisory board. That’s Wikipedia, “the encyclopedia anyone can edit,” where propaganda and hoaxes cross-pollinate to produce mutant strains of fake news that would make a 19th-century ‘yellow journal’ merchant blush.
The Wikipedia model posits that it’s hopeless to look for absolute truth, so the best we can hope for is “verifiability.” This is achieved by querying “reliable sources” and writing up whatever the consensus is. Editors are forbidden from drawing conclusions based on the sources they use – if a “reliable source” hasn’t covered it, it didn’t happen. And what does Wikipedia consider reliable? The same type of publications that NewsGuard assigns a “green” rating – mainstream media outlets – along with scholarly journals, books from reputable publishers, and so on.
Giving Wikipedia’s co-founder a say in determining what sources will be considered “reliable” in the future may sound like a terrible idea, but wait – there’s more. Wales’ latest project, WikiTribune, launched in 2017 with the lofty goal of fixing the news (sound familiar?) and attempting to wed the Wikipedia model of volunteer editors with the mainstream-media model of paid journalists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out, and Wales fired all the journalists. The project went dormant last year, but is now being re-launched as a “fact-checking wiki,” according to Wales. Surely it’s just a coincidence that he’s been welcomed onto the board of a company that wants to make its plugin part of the internet experience for everyone.
Hoaxes, mistakes, and propaganda written into Wikipedia make their way into “reliable sources” frequently, when rushed journalists who don’t have time for proper fact-checking instead glance at Wikipedia and uncritically reprint what they find there. If these journalists happen to write for a “reliable source,” what they’ve printed then becomes “reliable” for the purposes of Wikipedia, meaning that even if the original hoax, mistake, or propaganda is uncovered and removed, it can now be re-added ad infinitum, because a reliable source said it. This process is so common it has a name – “citogenesis.
Coverage of Wikipedia hoaxes that became ‘real’ tends to focus on the ridiculous ones – the fake Australian Aboriginal deity ‘Jar’Edo Wens’ who made it into a book on religion after hiding out in a Wikipedia entry for nine years – or the seemingly endless parade of celebrity death hoaxes. But citogenesis can have far more damaging effects. Turkish history professor Taner Akcam was detained by Canadian and later US authorities because Wikipedia vandals had written that he was a terrorist.
Editor Edward Patrick Alva fudged the facts in Wikipedia articles about controversial rape incidents on college campuses in order to make them conform to the version of events reported in ‘The Hunting Ground’, a film he helped produce, writes the Washington Examiner. The depiction of colleges as “hunting grounds” for sexual predators has arguably terrified a generation of women based on false and misrepresented data, and the editing of protagonists’ biographies to emphasize rape accusations that were never substantiated rises to the level of libel.
The US media spent years embroiled in a fictional conspiracy involving the Russian government colluding with Donald Trump to get him elected president, and Wikipedia had more to do with that than many people think. After all, when one encounters an unfamiliar name or term in the news – ‘Seth Rich’, ‘kompromat’ – they Google it, and the first result on Google is usually Wikipedia.
Yes, political operatives are editing Wikipedia, and they favor a certain narrative. Before the Mueller report crushed the Russiagate hopes of millions of #Resistance keyboard-warriors, Wikipedia editors – including several administrators – were seriously discussing banning“pro-Trump users” (a category some expanded to include users who denied the reality of the Russian-collusion conspiracy theory) from editing political articles. They had already decided to “purge” an article on “Russian interference in the 2016 US elections” of sources contradicting Russian hacking claims, so it was a logical next step. After all, reliable sources said there was collusion, so it must be true!
Wikipedia claims to be written by everyday people, but its history of pay-for-play editing by everyone from congressional aides to intelligence agencies to members of Parliament to “Zionist editing initiatives” to the Vatican – to say nothing of an army of corporate shills and PR flacks – proves that isn’t the whole story. Wikipedia does not actually forbid editing for pay, nor does Jimmy Wales condemn it, so long as the editor admits their paid status (on their profile page, which the casual Wikipedia reader never sees). What better partner for NewsGuard than a website where the ruling establishment can inject favorable coverage of itself while pretending it comes from the hoi polloi?
Trust in mainstream media dropped to historic lows on both sides of the pond around the time Trump was elected and the Brits voted themselves off the World-Island, outcomes that were both met with apocalyptic dismay from the ruling class. This outbreak of populism was blamed on ‘fake news’, a phenomenon that sprung fully-formed from the forehead of mainstream-media propagandists to explain away the people’s maddening tendency to vote in what they believed to be their best interests. Even though fake news has been a problem since the advent of the printing press, Americans and Brits were told that this new strain of disinformation, bearing the unmistakable imprint of Putin Inc., could single-handedly shatter our fragile democracies if we did not at once put down the independent media and rush back into the comforting arms of “reliable sources” (which happens to be the name of Brian Stelter’s show on CNN, a fact that is surely coincidental).
NewsGuard continues that patronizing narrative, serving up color-coded ‘nutrition labels’ to ensure internet users they won’t accidentally ingest anything spicy that might cause them to radically reconsider their place in the world, or their country’s policies, or their relationship to technologies like NewsGuard. It’s an extra-delicious irony that Tom Ridge, the same man who introduced a color-coded terror warning system during George W. Bush’s presidency, also sits on the advisory board of NewsGuard.
NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks, which has never had to issue a correction, an untrustworthy “red” rating, while trusting Wikipedia – which has unleashed literally hundreds of hoaxes on the world, and that’s only the ones we know about – so much they name its founder to their board. Wales’ appointment to the advisory board of NewsGuard is proof that this organization has never been about stopping the spread of fake news – only spreading their own.
‘We are at war’ with Russia: DNC Chair Perez says Trump ‘compromised’
RT | April 26, 2019
Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez went on CNN to declare a cyber war on Russia, and slammed President Donald Trump for being ‘compromised.’
“The federal government is asleep at the switch,” Perez told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on her show New Day, adding that the president had been disloyal to the country for “weaponizing” hacked material.
“When the Russians called Donald Trump and said ‘I got dirt on Hillary Clinton,’ they should have called the authorities,” Perez said, apparently referring to the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. “Instead they said ‘tell us what you got.’ That’s not right.”
Back in 2016, however, the DNC had no qualms about relying on a foreign intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump from various informants and ‘weaponize’ it in preparation for the presidential election. Steele later admitted sourcing his info from unverified internet sources – but not before it catalyzed two years of ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy and a costly Special Counsel investigation that ultimately found no collusion between Trump and Russia.
Veselnitskaya, interestingly, met with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson on both the days before and after the lawyer’s meeting with Donald Trump Jr. Fusion GPS is the research firm that paid for Christopher Steele’s kompromat job on Trump.
When asked if his party would accept leaked information on President Trump’s tax returns, Perez gave a non-answer.
“Well, again, we are entitled to that,” he said. “If you look at the law that chairman Neil of the House Ways and Means Committee is using. It’s clear. It doesn’t say you are entitled to [release your tax returns] except for the taxes of the president of the United States.”
Although the Mueller probe did not find any link between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, to the utter disappointment of some liberal media pundits, the collusion narrative survived. Media continues to speculate whether Trump was somehow compromised by Russia and is on Putin’s short leash. Democrats, including certain presidential hopefuls, have not given up on the hopes to oust Trump from office through impeachment proceedings, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris among the latest to join the rallying cry.
Media trust ranker NewsGuard launches in UK by greenlighting tabloids, adding ex-NATO chief to board
RT | April 24, 2019
NewsGuard, the trust-rating outfit that continues to approve of US media that spread the Russiagate conspiracy theory, has expanded operations to the UK and added a former NATO chief to its advisory board.
Announcing its UK debut on Wednesday, NewsGuard bragged about including Anders Fogh Rasmussen to their advisory board, describing him only as “former prime minister of Denmark.” While he did serve in that capacity between 2001 and 2009, his most recent public office was secretary-general of NATO (2009-2014), which NewsGuard omits from their tweet – but not from the Advisory Board page.
Rasmussen’s colleagues on NewsGuard’s board include former US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, as well as the self-described former “chief propagandist” for the US government Richard Stengel.
Other new additions to the board are Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Richard Sambrook, former “Director of Global News for the BBC” who now provides “editing and editorial guidance” for NewsGuard’s “nutrition labels.”
Those labels rank news outlets оn a number of categories, which are then combined into a trustworthiness score, expressed as a green checkmark or red “x.” There is a certain pattern in which kinds of outlets get the former and which get the latter.
Three major UK tabloids – The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star – all got an overall “green” rating, for instance. While NewsGuard claims to be rating outlets rather than individual articles, if you have their extension installed in your browser (and it comes by default with Microsoft’s Edge), you’ll see a NewsGuard symbol next to actual story headlines in your searches.
Media critic John Nolte of Breitbart – in the “red” category just like RT – pointed out on Monday that NewsGuard’s seal of approval can be found on nine of the top 12 debunked stories pushing the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory. He provided screenshots.
Even after the 448-page report by special counsel Robert Mueller spelled out “no collusion” between US President Donald Trump and Russia, multiple mainstream media outlets that have pushed this conspiracy for almost three years have refused to apologize or correct their reporting, claiming instead it was “mostly” proven correct.
“That big, green checkmark of approval still sits next to some of the most misleading stories in history,” Nolte wrote, adding, “In all my decades of following the media, I have never seen a more Orwellian attempt to mislead people by deliberately labeling lies as truth and truth as lies.”
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USS Liberty Massacre: A Pivotal Moment in the Hostile Takeover of America
By Kevin Barrett | Crescent | Dhu al-Qa’dah 24, 1445
In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.
What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.
As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” … continue
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- Hormuz and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
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- Putin Conveys to Trump Iran’s Vision on Possible Conflict Resolution – Kremlin
- If Americans Knew
- Gaza: Ceasefire Anniversary Marks Year of Failed Promises
- The American Conservative: Mike Huckabee Should Resign
- A C-Section in Shackles: A Palestinian Woman’s Harrowing Birth in Israeli Detention
- ‘He’s Desperate’: AIPAC Begins Spending Against Abdul El-Sayed to Boost Mike Rogers:
- Trump, Hormuz, and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
- For three years, Israel has killed a child in Gaza every 71 minutes – Daily Update
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- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
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